Systems for detection of texture elements from data obtained by mobile mapping systems (MMS) are known in the art. A MMS may be provided with one or more cameras that take pictures of the environment surrounding the MMS and are controlled by a processor on board the MMS. A MMS may take the form of a vehicle such as a car that is driven along roads of interest while the processor controls the camera(s) to take pictures of building facades. The locations of texture elements, like windows and doors, in the facade pictures are identified. The texture elements present in these facade pictures are then substituted by standard texture elements stored in a library that is accessible by the processor. Since these standard texture elements are used to construct the facades, the memory space required to store facades with their texture elements may be much less than the space required for storing all the original pictures with their original textures.
To build a textured 3D facade model, a good method for identification of such texture elements in the raw picture of the facade is required. Methods for analyzing and decomposing texture from pictures are known in the prior art. However, there is a chance that incorrect objects are identified as being texture elements, such as trees, cars, people, and other obstacles in front of a facade. Also, the methods may require heavy computational power. Moreover, the prior art processes require a high degree of human interaction to obtain good quality for the textural representation of the facade. The speed of manual extraction may be only 1 km/h, on average, which, in total, would bring a cost of thousands of man hours for an average sized city.
At least one object of at least one embodiment of the present invention is to overcome at least one of the above problems in the prior art.